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User blog:Koganes/Things that wiki taught me and my message to you
Things that wiki taught me, and my message to you. A study in what I learned through two years of falsifying my background in my last-ditch attempts to make friends. Hi! I'm Aisling, I used to be very active on this site (a statement more noticeable on a former account), but have been absent for the past 2 years. That being said, I still communicate with the friends I've met here via other social media platforms, and we occasionally have "throwback nights" where we look back at fond... and not so fond... memories we shared in our time spent together on the wiki. Our most recent revisit struck me on a more personal note than the others. It felt more bittersweet in comparison to the lighthearted laughfests I am used to. Perhaps it was because my reminiscing somehow mixed into the fact that I'm graduating high school in a few weeks, and am planning on leaving for college next January. I'm exhilarated to finally move onto the next chapter of my life, but that isn't to dilute the experiences I had in the one leading up to it. Whether or not I'd like to admit it, this wiki had a significant impact on my first two years of high school, and the critical life lessons I learned while being a part of it followed me into the ones in which I have been gone. Hopefully, they will continue to be a part of me as I carry on with blazing my own trail. Before I begin sharing them, allow me to share some critical information you should keep in mind while reading: I went into the specifics of this whole spiel on another blog entry that's hosted on a different wiki, but for those of you who don't know, I lied about my age for the entirety of being an active member on this website. I joined back in May 2011, when I was newly 12 and still in sixth grade. Yes, sixth grade. Now, mind you, this was back when there was more of an emphasis on being 13 at the very least when joining, if I recall correctly. Looking back, I feel that my hyperventilation over my age was a bit fruitless and even silly, but I feared that people would think that I was just another lame sixth grader if they were to know the truth! Plus, I was desperate to meet friends. And so, I faked my age. I believe I described myself as 15 to begin with. After a few months, I grew bored of wiki and decided to leave. I returned back in the winter of 8th grade when I was almost 14, and I was so ready to jump back into the swing of things! New friends to meet, yeah! Old friends to reunite with, yeah! But then my anticipation faltered upon my realization that, oh wait, on this account, I'm about three years older than I actually am. (and forgive me if my memory regarding my "wiki age" fails me. you have no idea how confusing it got sometimes LOL) I didn't want to just scrap the idea of returning altogether though. And so, I continued to try my best to be a convincing enough 16 year-old. Except this time, I decided to throw in some more details. I figured, "Hey, if I'm going to pretend to be someone else, why not expand on my little wiki persona a little bit more?" Wiki!Aisling was pretty much all that I aspired to be. As the years went on, I got to resume developing her story. She was a talented filmmaker, accepted into Yale at a young age, and then she transferred into New York University at age 18. She had boyfriends, and she went on dates. She also had some sad, more tragic elements to her tale. She survived sexual abuse and an eating disorder. But the fact that she still overcame such difficult obstacles to conquer was admirable, and made her come off as even more strong! ''(please note that it was not my intent to make such hardships seem like little more than "plot devices" or to diminish the trauma of those who have endured them. as a matter of fact, i have experienced such trauma myself from severe abuse and i was at risk of dying last year from an illness in the same vein of an eating disorder. i'll provide evidence if you do so request it. i am very much aware of the negative repercussions such experiences can have on people, considering i have gone through them myself. in addition, i was much younger and poorly informed back then, which obviously doesn't excuse such shallowness, but it does offer a smidgen of insight into what my line of thinking was back then in comparison to now). ''I kept up my act for two whole years. It was extremely frustrating, but wiki was all I had for that whole period of time, and I wasn't even close to being ready to leave despite how much my outside life was being affected by my continued exploitation of this whole other world in my head. I considered dropping everything and just leaving it all without a trace left behind a number of occasions, and though I believe I was able to take time off maybe twice, I always found myself back here, back in the cycle I had failed miserably to escape from. In the days leading up to my final blog, it took a lot of thinking, but I realized I didn't feel any desire whatsoever to live a life woven so tightly into a web of lies. Such a lifestyle was not fair to glorify unbeknownst to the faces of all of you, nor was it healthy for me. No longer was I willing to put up with the mindset I had adapted and had so unfortunately succumbed to for such a prolonged amount of time; one in which I convinced myself that so long as I was honest in every other aspect of my life, then it was okay to be the opposite in just one. No. That isn't the type of person I am. I'm not a manipulative phony. I'm Aisling. I'm 18 years old now. I'm graduating come November, and I'm heading off to college this winter. ''(P.S. i actually applied to the same college as my dearest friend that just so happens to be a former user here! here's to hoping i get in omg....) ''I've never had a boyfriend, nor have I been on a date. I haven't even had my first kiss. And yet, I'm growing up, huh? God, I already have. So, while I bid adieu to the last of my tender adolescence, let's take a moment to look back on all that I learned when I was a member of the Degrassi wiki. #'The internet is a dark, dark place.' - Okay. I'm sorry. I just have to get this point out of the way. You know how typically, sites like 4chan or Reddit or sometimes Tumblr (listen i love tumblr and i'll never be able to escape its' vice grip but i will always acknowledge its' many flaws both technically and internally) or the dreaded YouTube comments section are the building blocks of the internet that really mark someone's transition from, "oh my gosh, the internet is the best thing ever!" to "huh. i could've totally lived my entire life without witnessing this absolute cesspool adjacent to my youthful eyes."? Well, for me, that was Degrassi Wiki. I'm not even going to try to be vague or subtle about this first lesson; Degrassi Wiki is pretty much the definition a gateway drug. I mean, it was. Things have calmed down a lot since I've left, although this is just a basic observation I made from a brief skimming of this week's feed. Back then, though, it was the nicotine of my addiction to the internet. Degrassi Wiki is what opened my eyes to some of the most unfortunate people I had come across at the time, and proceeded to pave the path that led me to the previously exemplified Tumblr and YouTube. Listen, it's not even like this place was absolutely rotten and fallen from grace, because I have plenty of good parts of it to bring up in later points. Said good parts are what made my time here to largely be of the beneficial kind, if you could say that. To make this lesson easier to understand, let me provide you with a spectrum: the good, the bad, and the ugly. And anyone who was active in the same timeframe as I was... c'mon, you have to admit, when this website had ugly days, they were ugly. Trolls invading in the middle of night, with the simple intelligence that it was unlikely a mod was going to be awake enough to constantly be checking in on the site's activity. Racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, etc. etc.; the bread & butter of any popular message board, fortunately not a common occurrence among ours, but not nonexistent, either. Spam, spam, spam. Sexual harassment, gosh! Harassment in general, gosh! Bots linking pornographic material in the chatroom. There were also the much more minor offenses that somehow managed to have more lasting effects on the community, i.e. grown adults cussing out or dwelling into heated arguments with kids who don't know better, intense ship wars usually caused out of spite, some of the most severe superiority complexes I have ever come across, half-baked discourse that made my eyes roll into the back of my head, catfishing. I'm guilty, too. I got into a handful of conflicts, including one in which I threw a slur in the direction of my own best friend. Trust me, that's a moment of time that's been folded into the corners of the past. She's the one that wants to be roommates with me now. The thought of it still stings, though. Listen, me and my friends look back and try our best to make light out of those #iconic moments in wiki history, but back then, such events would cause such migraines. It felt petty then, and it feels petty now. The fact that some peoples' behavior and interactions with others tore literal friendships apart is just... sad. Not even in the pathetic way, in the genuinely sad way that makes your heart feel like it's shriveling up in your chest each time you think back at it. While it didn't introduce me to the worst of the worst when it comes to the internet, Degrassi Wiki is most definitely the platform where I learned just how vile the world wide web is capable of being if you look hard enough. #'Bandwagoning is a cop out, though a genuine coping mechanism'. - Okay, now that I've gotten that weightless rant out of the way, it's time to make things a little more optimistic. This lesson actually ties in with multiple points I'll also make throughout the text of this list, but I feel like this one deserves its' own little section because of how relevant it is to me. I grew up adoring cartoons and Ghibli and video games. Prior to becoming a constant poster to these boards, I casually enjoyed Degrassi (of course), The Walking Dead, One Tree Hill, Breaking Bad, etc., but they failed to enchant me in the same way aforementioned pieces of media did. However, upon noticing that so many of these users were in love with Game Of Thrones, and Pretty Little Liars, and Harry Potter, I feigned interest in those as well, among others. Look... there's a fine line between becoming involved in a fanbase when its' popularity becomes impossible to ignore, only to genuinely enjoy it and want to contribute to the hype later on vs. joining in on a trend and faking your love for it in the efforts to conform and to please others. You've probably noticed a theme of sheer dishonesty being prevalent among my time here by now, and I'm so ashamed to say I'm only scratching the surface. Luckily, I've become more comfortable with my unbridled, unadulterated passion for animation of all kinds, and film, and video games. I'm glad I got to put those parts of me on display in the great Animegeddon of 2014. It allowed me to form even closer relationships with people who I knew I didn't have to treat as an audience, but rather as my friends. In essence, while hopping on the bandwagon may seem like the best thing to do in the long-term, there are so many better ways to get along with people without having to be a total chameleon all the time. You're just blending yourself into the wrong crowd, is all. You'll always look ''better doing what you know will make you ''feel ''better. I'll expand more on this later. #'Meeting new people is like reaching your hand into a blind bag'. - You never know what, or in this case, ''who you're going to find. Joining a forum is absolutely immersing oneself into a new community, much like moving to a different town, the first day of high school or camp or college, or the introductory shift at a new job. I can almost guarantee you won't find the person or the people who fit right into your life like a missing piece to a puzzle on your first try. You're going to meet jerks (like me). You're going to meet liars (like me). You're going to meet shrinking violets (like me). (except you didn't really know all that until i started showing my true colors a tad bit more, huh? that being said, you're going to meet absolute snakes me). There are so many types of people that you can't avoid in your lifetime. There's the annoying ones like the know-it-alls and pretentious film nerds and divas and narcissists and everything in between. You're going to be forced to put up with them from time to time, or maybe all the time if you surround yourself in them enough. Then there's the downright scary ones; the ones that make themselves appear on the front page of the paper or make headlines on every major news station, and for reasons that make your jaw drop in the bad way. In the way that you can't believe such evil exists in the world. The ones that constantly shove their twisted ideologies down your throat out of the futile desire that you'll swallow them down. Those people are out there, a majority of them not being rare breeds. But I promise you that you'll find people who feel like home to you... the type of people who make you realize that, despite all that feels wrong in this world, it's still not as bad as you think. Even though it's still pretty bad sometimes. Because a lot of people suck. Just don't lose hope in the ones that don't. #'Change is good!' - Yeah! I mean, especially when it's on your own terms. It's fascinating to watch the evolution of my personality when me and my friends look back on old comments and blogs and screenshots here. I started off as such a goody-two-shoes, sweet as honey. However, I've realized that yes, kindness is extremely important and should be a trait that all should strive to attain, but not when it feels false. I experienced the latter when I began to feel as though a close friend on here was growing tired of me out of the sudden recognition that there were other users much more cool and outgoing than me! So I decided, screw it! I became a lot more blunt and unafraid to speak my mind when I felt something was off. This resulted in me being rude, which, though not necessarily excusable, was also admittedly justified given how much of a doormat I had become! It's part of what made coming on the wiki fun for a while, too, because I could be someone so much more different than who I was in the world outside the screen. That's when I started to become closer to everyone here, and it was... fine. But I still seemed like a ghost of myself like before, just in a different way, and I think others can say the same. Now that I'm writing about it, I do remember when people basically implied that they actually preferred the "old me". But the thing is, even the "old me" didn't feel like the "right me", either. It took me a long time to bounce back and learn to just be who I felt safe with being. Unfortunately, I've reverted to a lot of my old ways, in that I fail to assert myself properly both on and off the internet. I like the syntax and the general approach I use online now, though, and I have eliminated swearing from my vocabulary completely, and everywhere, since I've become closer with God. i type like this now. not too much emphasis on punctuation and lots of run-on sentences. made-up words and little fixation on perfect grammar and lotsa keysmashes jsfhmlksdlkjfl inappropriate use of commas..... (and ellipses and parentheses). occasional use of slanguage and i'm always screaming abt boys....... it's the rule of cool baby!!!!! that's the good stuff #'I have some of the best friends in the world'. There's the guy who manages to make even my darkest hours bearable enough to slip out of, so I can slip straight into readying myself for the renewal of tomorrow. Then there's my little sister, who despite being so different from me in terms of social status and personality can still be so easy to empathize with when she seeks comfort in me. I can't go without mentioning the incredible posse of people I've kept in touch with ever since I left wiki. I think we only grew closer through my confession about my age and what was going on beyond the scenes, and I feel it is because they sympathized with me so deeply, and I am eternally grateful for them. And maybe you have friends like these ones, too. I hope you do. #'I'm never going to be able to socialize with people in the way I wish I could'. - And that's okay. I'm autistic (professionally diagnosed!), and I have social anxiety (also diagnosed!), thus lessening my ability to accomplish basic reciprocal tasks, such as maintaining eye contact (the worst thing in the world oh my God??? people think i have problems with my eyes like no im just like this. im sorry. i wanna die), utilizing appropriate body language to demonstrate that I am listening, and communicating with people in a way that others would perceive as "normal". Coinciding with that, I struggle deeply with initiating conversation due to my poor self-esteem, as well as my crippling fear that I would be wasting someone's time if I did. I pushed myself enough when I was using this website, and everybody was messaging each other back and forth on their talkpages. I figured it was a way I could show people that I cared, at the very least. But I realize now that, while taking an extra step out of your comfort zone is good for you, forcing yourself to walk miles upon smiles away from it is not. Gosh, I've spent hours before agonizing over and planning out messages to people only to not even end up sending them. I had a breakdown the other day when I realized I absolutely had to send out some emails to my selected colleges in order to prove to them that I'm mature enough to engage in proper, appropriate conversations. I still feel guilty each time I send my own mother a text. Like I said though, the fact that in these situations, I went above and beyond the expectations I had originally positioned myself within is still an accomplishment in itself. I could have not even bothered planning out a message to begin with, but I didn't. I could have not reached out to schools at all and tether myself to waiting for them to email me, but I didn't. I could cut off all contact with my mom completely if I wanted to, even if doing so would break her heart, but I didn't. Don't shove yourself way past your own limit just to make other people happy... and this leads me to my next, and penultimate lesson learned. #'Be yourself'. - The most cliché point on this list, but easily the most universally applicable. Throughout my time here, I always felt as though I needed to lie in the efforts to garner the approval of others. So many of the little stories I fabricated in my head to share in the comments existed solely to receive some kind of validation, whether it was praise or undying support. I felt like half a person, the other half fueled by the reassuring words of people who barely knew me. Or maybe I just felt empty. When I was having genuine moments of sincerity with someone... offering advice when they were in times of turmoil, or raving on and on about anime, or discussing the latest update to a manga we were both keeping up with... those were the times where I felt most whole. In those tiny flashes of carefree bliss amidst of sea of hollow snippets of my life, my insecurities may not have faded away completely, but the corrupted methods I used to conceal them did. Don't live your life trapped beneath the crushing weight of others' unambiguous definitions of P E R F E C T I O N; start with making it your mission to be G O O D E N O U G H for you, and only you. Don't spend an unbearable amount of time fretting over the need to check off every box you feel will make you flawless. Don't constantly seek out attention from others just because you want it, but because you deserve it, and make yourself worthy of deserving it. Pretty soon, you'll find that you don't even have to do such seeking to begin with, because there will be people who love you, who dole affirmations of your worth out naturally, all because ''they love you. And they can't make you love you, so soon you'll learn to love you, too. #'You are a work in progress'''. - And so am I. I hate the person I was here. So manipulative, so two-faced, so ugly, so impulsive. I still hate the person I am now, and who I was here is partially responsible for that. But two years of falsehood are only blips in the metaphorical timeline of my life. I still have time left. It's time to graduate! I'll have a great ceremony, and I'll get into the same college as her. I'll get all sorts of cool decorations for my dorm. Star Wars bedsheets. I'll have my first kiss. A boy will like me and want to be my boyfriend. I'll get my teaching certificate, and become a teacher. I'll carry on the legacy that Mr. D from 8th grade history left behind when he died. I'll make a difference in peoples' lives like you did in mine. I can do this. I can do this, right? Tell me I can do this. thank you for reading omg.... whether you're a stranger who didn't know who i was or someone who knows me all too well (n maybe too well now)... have a nice day and God bless you!!! p.s. i'll probably update this blog later with some graduation photos when the time comes.... oh man! oh man Category:Blog posts